Five serious but avoidable financial mistakes we hear from time to time at a Bootstrapper Breakfast: Mistake: using credit cards to finance your startup. Fix: Pay cash, trade favors, barter, go without, but don't let your monthly balance roll over and accumulate. Mistake: not having a stopping rule for when you [...]

Every once in awhile we find great workshops that are open to all size companies. Bill Meade’s “Capturing Intellectual Property” is one such workshop. His hands-on workshop will cover: What is intellectual property (IP) The forms and functions of legal IP protections The IP system and its functioning (on one [...]

Following closely on the heels of Monday's announcement of Hacker Dojo relocating we received the following notice this afternoon from Ground Floor Silicon Valley Special Announcement We are writing to members of the Ground Floor community to let everyone know that the building at 2030 Duane Avenue has been sold. The [...]

Hacker Dojo announced today that they are moving to a new home at 599 Fairchild Drive in Mountain View from their problematic location at 140A South Whisman Road in Mountain View. Hacker Dojo has found a new home, just 5 minutes away from our current location. The new building is bigger, [...]

Max Bloom and Peter Bloom--yes they are brothers--have opened a new co-working space in Santa Clara called "Ground Floor Silicon Valley." The 15,000 square foot facility is located at 2030 Duane Avenue, Santa Clara, CA 95054 It's an interesting facility that has only been open a few weeks. The facility [...]

If you are looking to rent a desk or conference room by the hour, day, week or month here are four tools you can use to search. All of them cover Silicon Valley and other metropolitan regions as well Deskwanted LiquidSpace Loosecubes OpenDesks Updated: Also consider Evenues and Cloud Virtual [...]

Companies names have sure changed in the last year or so. I was noticing today how many signs outside of office buildings seem to be branch offices for these firms: Move In Now First Month Free Your Name Here Available for Lease Space for Rent Here are two directories that [...]

In earlier interviews Frank Bailey and Ed Correia each recommended using a broker as the most effective approach to finding an office. So I called Arwen Funk, a commercial and residential broker, to get some background. Arwen pointed out some potential land mines in leasing contracts such as property tax [...]

Today Sean and I sat down with Frank Bailey, VP of Sales from Runtime Design Automation. RTDA offers automation tools that manage all design resources such as licenses and CPU's in order to streamline workflow. RTDA products track all licenses in your network, capture all jobs in your project, and [...]

For my third post in the "First office" series, I wanted to learn about alternative office options to incubators. Earlier this month I sat down with Ed Correia, founder of Sagacent Technologies, to learn about his experience in finding the right first office. Sagacent Technologies specializes in business technology management [...]

Following up on my "Silicon Valley Incubators" post in the "First Office" series I wanted to get a tenant's perspective on the the advantages and drawbacks of locating in a business incubator. Symphony Consulting is a manufacturing outsourcing, procurement, and supply chain consulting firm that helps original equipment manufacturers and [...]

This is the first in a series of blog posts on where a start-up team might look for their first office. One of the first types of office space to consider would be space in a business incubator. A business incubator is comprised of multiple businesses operating independently within one [...]